Blessing

Rising from 18m below the surface, it is a holy statue for the

Christianity, a symbol to inspire those who explore and love the sea.

Nice capture salvatore, but it can be improved... here is how:

 

1. the original image is missing of contrast, you can edit it in photoshop using brightness/contrast and set it to leave lightness unaltered and enhanche contrast until you have sufficient dark tones.

2. even if we all dont like oversatured images, we can improve the seense of deepnes of the water by enhanching saturation by 10 points or so..

3. dodge and burn is necessary here... burn shadows into brighter areas (example the pedestal) and to enhanche fish silohuettes; dodge the brightest areas of the statue to enhanche a little contrast.

4. unsharp mask will give you fine details.. i used 500/0,2/0 and it worked pretty well with this image, use also the sharp brush set to brighten into darkest areas and set to darken into brightest areas...

the image itself is very very nice... i guess with this enhanchements can be rendered better. Well done anyway.

Thank you Giuseppe for your suggestion.

Actually I don't know how to use photoshop so well.

I will excercise following yor guidelines.

Can you suggest a title of a good book on photoshop?

 

S

the only photoshop book i use it "photoshop professionale" by D. Margulis, Edizioni Hoepli... it is different from many photoshop books becouse it doesn't actually focus on how manipulate images (it doesnt tell you how to cut things here, paste them there, create all-syntetic images etc)... instead it gives a professiona look on how to manage curves and colors, sharpening mask and similar things, to perfect an already - quite - good image! You will find there color correction, pre-press curves adjustaments etc etc... it is very useful if you want to stick yourself to "ethical" image manipulation, meaning that you don't want to create composites... hopefully some manipulation geek could offer you a better advice if you want to go in the other direction - try to ask at the digital photography forum.